SEO by Binh

This is the biggest SEO mistake I ever made, and here is how you could avoid them.

Problem

The disaster is that my sub blogs never got indexed by Google even though my main blog SEO Web Design with Binh Nguyen was at PageRank 4.

I started making 4 sub domains a while back in June 2008. Those are:

1. seo.binh.name – Search Engine Optimzation
2. wp.binh.name – WordPress Resources
3. webdesign.binh.name – Web Design
4. cntt.binh.name – CNTT (IT)

Until now, I didn’t see any pages from those blogs on Google search result page, even though they are on Yahoo! search. I thought that my domain got problem, either sandboxed by Google, or something worse.

Solution

Recently, thanks to Andy Beard.eu for notifying me on My Sub-Domains Not Indexed, that my new blogs were having the following meta tag:

name=’robots’ content=’noindex,nofollow’

So I started to have a feeling that something was wrong in the blog settings. I tried to view my blogs to see what is going on.

Today when I finally able to get onto my blog, I found out the problem.I set my blog privacy to block search engines!!!

Here is what I saw on my blog settings:

Privacy Settings

Blog Visibility

(_) I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers and in public listings around this site.

(o) I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors

So that’s the story, I enabled the first option to allow search engines to crawl my blogs. Hopefully in few more days those blogs will become available for searching.

I hope that you won’t make the same mistake as I did. But if you do, feel free to share it here with me

My excuse

No, I’m not that dump as you have been thinking while reading my article.  I turned the privacy on because I didn’t want to mess up the search engine while adding and modifying the static pages and site structure. What I really didn’t take care of was to disable it after those blogs are published.

The lesson learned

If you want to get your site indexed, remember to check

• the robots.txt file for disallow,
• the robots meta tag for noindex,
• the privacy setting of your blog.

Hi everyone! This is my first post, to declare the birth of Search Engine Optimization site/blog hybrid. This site will provide free tips on SEO so subscribe to the RSS feed now and stay up to date.